They have 7 tools that you can use for free. You do hvae to do a couple of silly things to get to the reports: fill out a form so you’re on their mailing list, and do a tweet/Facebook post that you’re using them.

Here’s what they offer:

Twitter Follower Analysis

Instagram User Analysis

Facebook Fan Page Analysis

Facebook Insights Analysis

Facebook Competitive Analysis

Facebook Content Analysis

Twitter Customer Service Analysis

I didn’t play with the Facebook Competitive Analysis report – we don’t really have a competitor in Topeka 🙂 I did test drive the others.

Here’s a couple of highlights from some of the reports:

Twitter Follower Analysis – shows how active your audience is (about half of my library’s audience has tweeted fairly recently). Also provides a list of our most influential followers, which is handy to know!

Instagram Report – shows that more people interact with our videos instead of our photos. Also gives a list of our most active commenters. Good to know, so we can interact with them more.

Sorta odd – our top day/time for Instagram engagement (according to this report) is Monday morning at 8am! That’s when 24% of our comments happen. OK – probably not so odd, because we post pics and videos from our Monday morning farmer’s market that happens in the library parking lot. And people comment on those photos and videos. Still useful to know!

Facebook Fan Report – shows our top users by the number of comments. Again – that’s a really nice thing to know. You want to interact with your power users in a social media channel, because they are most likely your local influencers within that social media tool. Make them happy, and they will share – thus increasing your reach in your community.

Facebook Insights Report – shows that in 2 weeks, we reached almost 100,000 people (i.e., how many people saw something on Facebook from or about us). Name another free tool that reaches that many people.

So – just some highlights from a couple of free social media reporting tools. Play with them and see what you think!

This is the best one (and the last, for now). People often ask for the ROI of social media. And true ROI for social media is often hard to show. Sometimes social media managers create a weird, complex â€œweekly engagementâ€ metric that â€¦ well â€¦ doesnâ€™t really do much. Why? Their metric tends to only show activity within that single social media tool.

Showing activity within a social media channel is ok. But is that getting more books checked out? Getting people to your programs? Getting people to your website? Nope.

I’ve been trying to get some useful ROI type stats out of all this social media I’ve been tracking. Hereâ€™s what Iâ€™ve discovered. If you have a better thing to count, please share!

I count two ROI trends:

1. Number of visits to the website per post created. For this number, I divide the total referralsÂ for the month into the number of posts we create, to get the final number. For example, in May we had 865 total referralsÂ and 204 total social media posts. So divide that (and round up), and you get 4. Which means for every social media post we created in May, we achieved four visits to the website.

Again, weâ€™re talking trends here – itâ€™s not an exact science. But still, this stat does show that when staff create social media posts, they drive traffic to our website. Bingo – ROI.

2. Number of interactions per post created. This is similar, but a bit more lightweight. Divide the monthly engagement metric total by the number of posts created for the month. For May, we ended up with 94 interactions per post created.

Lightweight, but tells a nice story. For every post we did in May, we got people to do something – click like, share, comment, favorite, retweet, or watch – 94 times.

Whyâ€™s this good? It means theyâ€™re interested enough in our content, and therefore the library, to remember it, to share it, to add their thoughts to it. To respond in some way to it. Not a bad thing at all – interest in the library is a good thing!

So – thatâ€™s what weâ€™re doing at the moment. What are you tracking? Is it similar? Please share!

In this series of articles, Iâ€™ve been talking about what types of social media analytics my library tracks. Weâ€™ve already discussed Activity Metrics, Audience Metrics and Engagement Metrics. Today weâ€™ll cover ReferralÂ Metrics.

Time for referralÂ metrics. Whatâ€™s that? A referralÂ is simply getting someone from one thing to another (i.e., you’ve “referred them”). For example, from Facebook to your website. Thankfully, Google Analytics now counts referrals.

To get there, open up Google Analytics. Go to Acquisition, then click Social, then Network Referrals.

There, you’ll find a handy-dandy report of website visitors that started off in a social media page, and ended up on your website. I count the Sessions number for each of the four social media channels that Iâ€™m tracking, and then add those together. For May, we had 865 referrals to our website from social media.

This is a pretty useful number, because it shows interest. Someone was interested enough in something you mentioned on one of your social media channels to actually click through to your website. Nice!

In this series of articles, Iâ€™ve been talking about what types of social media analytics my library tracks. Weâ€™ve already discussed Activity Metrics and Audience Metrics. Today weâ€™ll cover Engagement Metrics.

Now for the geekier metricsâ€¦ Engagement metrics! Whatâ€™s engagement? Iâ€™m counting it as stuff people actually DO on your social media channel. That includes activities like:Â Liking, Sharing, clicking a link, repinning, watching the video, leaving a comment, replying, ReTweeting, etc.

Hereâ€™s what we track:

Facebook: Facebook, with their HUGE amounts of analytics, makes it difficult to count an accurate “here’s what people did” number. Their stats are more geared towards weekly trend reports, and not so much for reporting monthly numbers. But never fear – it can be done!

Hereâ€™s what I do (if there’s a better way to do it, please let me know!) – download the Excel version of Facebook Insights for the month. (As an aside, do this anyway and check out all the data Facebook provides. There is a TON of it). I use the stat for Daily Page Engaged Users, and just add up the daily numbers for the month. Daily Page Engaged UsersÂ reports â€œThe number of people who engaged with your Page. Engagement includes any click or story created. (Unique Users)â€. For May, we had 5478 people who engaged in some way with our Facebook Page.

Twitter:Â For Twitter, I get my number byÂ downloading the monthly excel version of stats for Twitter, and then counting a bunch of activity and engagement columns, including:

retweets

replies

favorites

user profile clicks

URL clicks

hashtag clicks

detail expands

permalink clicks

embedded media clicks

app opens

app install attempts

follows

email tweet

831 for May total.

Youtube: No spreadsheet needed here (though you could download one if you wanted to!). Youtubeâ€™s analytics provides a handy month filter, and an engagement section on the main page of analytics. So I add up the Likes, Comments, Shares, and Favorites for the month. I also include the number of views. Pretty important for a video service!

So for May, we had 67 total engagement (favorites, comments, likes, and shares) and 12,565 views.

Pinterest: Excel spreadsheet time again. We count Repins and Clicks. So for May, we had 212 repins and clicks in Pinterest.

Then, like all the other stats, I schmush those number together to come up with Total Engagement for the month. For May, our total engagement was 19,153. That’s a lot of people doing a lot of stuff!